Internet technology offers application developers a combination of declarative and programmatic elements for use in developing applications. Internet application developers use declarative elements such as hyper-text markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) in documents that provide structure, content and decoration, and programmatic elements such as JavaScript functions to provide computational and interactive behavior based on the documents. This technology has provided applications that are both browser-deployable and responsive. The term “browser” is intended to mean not only an Internet browser but any universal user-interface program, i.e., a program that loads and renders a document-based graphical user interface (GUI) of an application, handles user interaction with the GUI, and is capable of loading GUI definitions from local or remote sources.
Electronic maps are an important medium for many interactive applications. Many map-based applications are not browser-deployable or are limited to a narrow range of interactive behavior. Some map toolkits offer browser-deployable application GUIs with an expanded range of interactive behavior. However, these map toolkits are known to restrict the composition ability of developers.